October 2014
Well, what a hectic and stressful couple of months I've had. Moving house took up about 2 weeks of my life and about 2 years off it. Getting time to do anything just seems so hard, I'm about a month late with this update, but, Im so happy that I am now in MY house and not someone else's that I am paying their mortgage. Another thing about moving into my own place is I now have this strange obsession to decorate. I guess its because I have never had the freedom to do so in all the places I have rented before. Of course this means its something else that takes my time up. I don't want to bore everyone to death about decorating so I will keep this part short and just show a few progress pics, skip past them if its not your thing.
Enough of that crap, back to the main thing, the van.
I've been lucky to get just a few weekends down to the garage. I would normally go atleast once a week after work but the route to the garage from work has been closed for major bridge works and the detour adds about 40mins during rush hour traffic which I cant be bothered with. I also found it a bit difficult top get back into the swing of things from when I last touched the van before the small bike project. It was also because I had to start back on the van with a tricky area to sort out that left me frustrated at times, the front disc set up.
Just to re-cap, the vented discs and 4 pot callipers are taken from a 3.5 ton long wheel base mk2 Ford transit. The same as this.
I think I briefly mentioned a while ago that to get all this to fit I needed to modify a few bits. Because of the age of my van the stock wheel hub was a bit weedy compared to the later model ones so I managed to part exchange them with the owner of the Thames club for later versions, Here it is before having anything done to it.
If I remember correctly ( it has been a few months), I got an engineer to get it in the lathe and skim the front and rear face a bit to make it true, then the rear of the hub was turned down a little for clearance and to make a ring for the disc to register onto then I also got 5 holes on a pcd of 5 x 100 so I could bolt the Transit discs in from behind. It cost £180 for the pair and he done a great job of it.
He also skimmed the inner hole of the vented disc so it would sit behind the hub.
Bolted together they make the complete hub/disc assembly. I was going to get him to press the wheel studs in but they hadn't arrived at that point so I will get that done later.
With that sorted I had to get the calliper bracket mounted. Here is the standard stub axle. Those four bolts would normally hold the back of the drum assembly in place but I now need them to hold the calliper bracket instead.
This is the standard transit calliper bracket, unfortunately its not a straight bolt on fit. Those holes are just ever so slightly the wrong pcd.
To remedy this I cut 4 bits of 10mm bar and placed them in the holes.
Quick zap with the mig and a clean up and I have a bracket ready for new holes.
When I was working all this out I decided that I would keep the bracket at the same angle as the transit, that is, exactly at 90 degrees to the disc. I mocked it up to see what it was like.
Everything was fine, until, I went to full lock. On full lock and the suspension fully extended the calliper would be hitting against the lower suspension arm, not good. By turning the calliper anti clockwise by about 5 degrees I was able to miss all the vital suspension parts on full lock. To get these holes done correctly I headed back to the engineers again and left them with him.
I did try to drill one of the holes myself in the pillar drill but there was soo much wobble I couldn't get it to with in tolerances, the engineer done them in his milling machine so they turned out exactly correct.
When I got them back I bolted it all together and with a 2mm shim to centralise the calliper everything was great.
No more fouling of the lower arm at full extension.
Plus, I think the look awesome.
So, after a difficult re-start I managed to get it all to work. Well, the anti roll bar still hits the calliper but is much easier to move that back an inch than the rest of what I've done. Im sure these discs combined with the rear 9 inch drums will be adequate to the performance of the van. I also have a 1inch bore landrover mastercylinder installed and will be fitting a remote brake booster. I feel this is a good base to start from and can fine tune it once I get it running and can test drive it.
I also managed to get a full set of 4 15 inch wheels from Sandy at the Thames owner club. I feel I will be taking another trip to the engineers so he can split these and I can get on with banding them.
On another slight tangent, I'm getting kicked out of my garage. My boss knows I have just bought a new house and I told him I'm looking to get a garage built in the garden. He is being very reasonable about it though, I said I hope to have a garage installed before July next year so he has given me until then to get everything sorted. It makes sense, he could be renting the whole building out to someone and actually making profit and the same for me, I pay £100 a month which is very cheap for what I get but still, that's £1200 a year I will be saving.
Oh, another little thing before I go, I managed to sell the bike. I wasn't sure what it was worth so my first Ebay adventure at £2500 was a test to see what kind of offers I would receive. A couple people offered £1500 so when it ended I put it back on starting at £1500. I kind of hoped id get a few people interested in it but it only got one bid, well, atleast I got my £1500.
Bye-bye,
After all my costs I made about £1000 not including labour which is a nice tidy sum I have put away to go towards the garage build. I am on the look out for a second hand double pre-fab concrete garage if anyone knows of one going cheap?.
Well, that concludes this months work. I wish I could split myself up, one to go to work, one to be with the wife, one to go to the van, one to decorate the house and one to get on with finding and building a garage plus foundations.
Oh, oh, one last thing, be sure to get the next issue of Classic Ford, they sent a photographer down and its going to be featured in the grafters section, yippee!.
